


hold my hand forever if you need to let it go

by andibeth82



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Bucky Barnes Feels, Captain America: The Winter Soldier Spoilers, Character Study, F/M, Flashbacks, Memory Loss, Past Lives, Red Room
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-15
Updated: 2013-11-15
Packaged: 2018-01-01 16:01:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1045799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andibeth82/pseuds/andibeth82
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His name is Bucky Barnes.</p><p>His name <i>was</i> Bucky Barnes.</p><p>(There's a lot that he doesn't remember.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	hold my hand forever if you need to let it go

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired firstly by [liveonthesun](http://archiveofourown.org/users/liveonthesun), who posted [this quote](http://blackwidowry.tumblr.com/post/63783799332) on Tumblr and asked that someone write Red Room-based Bucky/Natasha for it (I hope I've done you proud.) Inspired secondly by the events seen in the Captain America: Winter Soldier trailers. [Also, events of said trailer/movie are at this point mostly speculation and therefore based upon my own headcanon and feelings.]
> 
> Huge thanks to [bobsessive](http://bobsessive.tumblr.com) for being my beta always, and liveonthesun for helping me indulge in feelings.

His name is Bucky Barnes.

His name _was_ Bucky Barnes.

(There’s a lot that he doesn’t remember.)

 

-

 

It started innocently enough – a name, a face, a curl of hair. Natasha Romanov, and that was all he had, a name and a face and hair of the same color that would soon coat his hands and his stomach and the bottoms of his feet. _That_ he remembers, though he doesn’t know how or why or when, small parts of a whole still locked up tight somewhere in the back of his brain, waiting to be rebuilt, reborn, rematerialized.

_You train her. Train the girl._

They knew her as the girl. He knew her as the assassin. He knew that she could take out five men without breaking a sweat, and that she’s broken more bones than her medical file listed on record. He would never claim to be the best at reading people but for some reason he could read her, could read the death wish behind unforgiving eyes and the years of broken promises that have stripped the naivety from her body as if it were nothing more than a thin layer of skin.

They ask if he wants to be armed. (He doesn’t.) They tell her she’s dangerous, that she’s volatile, that she’s killed before and that she’s killed for less. (He shrugs it off.) He can take care of himself, he’s been doing so for a long time, he doesn’t care whether he lives or dies because he’s already died. And, to be honest, he’s already lived.

It’s chillingly still when he enters, when they open the bolted door, and he expects an attack – a knife at his throat, a drop from the ceiling, a rope around his neck. But there’s no assault waiting for him, nothing to make him unleash his own learned skill, and it’s only after the door has closed that he lets his eyes come into focus, finds the figure huddled in the corner of the dark room.

Thin arms are wrapped around dirty legs, a position that should mark her as vulnerable but there’s a clear message hidden in her stature that translates to _stay away_ and it’s enough for him keep his distance. He weighs his options before moving closer, dropping to his knees in front of her contorted form. Against his better judgment, he presses a finger to her chin and lifts, aligning her angular face with his own.

Cold eyes, calculating eyes, eyes the color of something dark and dangerous.

“Are you my killer?”

And that’s how Bucky Barnes first meets Natasha Romanov, in a damp cell on the edge of a Russian continent where she doesn’t care if she lives and he doesn’t care if he dies.

 “I’m your trainer.”

 

-

 

So he learns her name is Natasha, that it used to be Natalia, that she always had red hair but that she didn’t always have red hands.

He learns to say her name the way most people would breathe air, something that you need to survive because without it, you’ll die.

 

-

 

And he also learns that she’s _good_.

They didn’t lie, not that they ever lie, they don’t bother with people who can only give half of the whole and they only bother with the best. But the truth is, she’s better than the best. She’s fast and uncompromising and unforgiving and unreadable. She’s perhaps the finest he’s ever trained, and what’s more, she knows it.

He teaches her what it feels like to kill, to _really_ kill, and sees the look in her face when she disarms another guard or takes down a rogue target. He’s pretty sure he’s never seen such determination before, even in spies that came from the womb of those who had made a living out of this, who were inherently predisposed to a life of nameless targets and dripping ledgers. It’s not just determination from someone who can kill and who has been killed.

It’s determination from someone who no longer has any will to live.

 

-

 

So Bucky continues to learn. He learns that even though it would probably help her in the end, she’ll never dye her bright red hair because it’s the only thing about her that’s real.

He learns that she’s spent her whole life being unmade and remade and one day, in a fit of compassion, vows to give her at least one thing besides her hair that she can classify as authentic before she dies.

 

-

 

Because no matter what Bucky Barnes feels for Natasha Romanov, and no matter how good she is, and no matter how much he tries to spin the arrow in the other direction, she will die. Her body is twenty-two and her mind is eighty-six and she understands the risks of what they do – of what they live for - but it doesn’t change the outcome. It’s expectable, really, and only a matter of time before everything catches up with them, and maybe one day Natasha will live to be one hundred or two hundred but there’s no age limit to knives, to bombs and ropes and poison.

Bucky learns. Natasha learns. She tells him in her Russian tongue that she doesn’t fear death, that she was made for it. That _they_ were made for it.

_You will die with me, one day, and we will die together._

It’s a promise he doesn’t acknowledge and doesn’t need to, a silent strand of understanding stretching between two people who have been unmade, who cling to each other like the only beacons of light in a world otherwise shrouded in darkness, who only know their own identities when they’re entangled in each other’s skin.

  
-

 

She leaves.

And that’s it. One day, after months of touching and sharing and killing, Natasha Romanov leaves, and he wakes up alone and cold and pulling at blankets that should hold another body, gripping a pillow where his hands are used to meeting hard, wavy hair.

It’s not a new kind of situation – Bucky Barnes has been left alone and left behind – but there’s a switch in his brain that takes this abandonment differently than the rest and he lashes out at the first officer that enters his cell, taking him down in one smooth punch to the throat.

They come in droves after that, driving needles into his skin, but he fights them off with strength that should be more surprising until someone grabs his hands, twisting them back into cold metal cuffs behind his spine.

A blow, a stab, an eye opening to darkness and pain. Metal on his body, in his mouth, an impossible barrier against feeling and reality, and a foot by his stomach.

_Did you love her?_

Say yes and you die. Say no and you die. Or maybe you live, but that’s not likely, not here, and so you might as well stop pretending there’s anything different than life and death and life and death, over and over and over again, like a broken, unfixable record with an erratic needle, a polygraph machine attempting to reconcile a life of deceit with a single sliver of reality.

He closes his eyes.

He will say a word that means nothing and he will be left with a memory that means everything, but soon he will forget that, too, red hair and red hands and red on her face, near the corner of her mouth where she’s ducked a nearly fatal attack, near the curve of her collarbone where he’s bitten away skin, near the bottom of her stomach where his fingers have dug into soft, white flesh, a light and lilting laugh, a cry of release and passion, genuine noises of pleasure and a warmth that he thought existed only in dreams.

 

-

 

He’s twenty-one, or maybe seventy-one – it always changes and he doesn’t have much to go off of in this new, real world, but in the end it doesn’t matter, because he does what he’s always been trained to do and he does it well. Knives cut into arms not covered by a thick black vest and bullets widen holes in already damaged skulls and it’s so _easy_ , to dispose and kill and tally the ledger without a second thought.

It’s easier than it was, and it will continue to be so, because if there’s anything Bucky Barnes knows is that you have to live and die in order to die and live.

(Her words, a mantra whispered against the curve of his ear, bodies still heaving against each other on nights when the hands of killers became the hands of lovers.)

He’s still learning, but this time it’s a voice he can’t quite remember with a smile that he can’t quite recall.

 

-

 

He has a mission, and it’s a simple one: take out the man, take out his company. The man is someone by the name of Captain America, two words that strike a chord somewhere in the back of his brain, though he doesn’t know exactly why. The company is something by the name of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Bucky hates them on principle; he’s never been a fan of organizations that seem cagey by nature and by designation.

They told him it would be a harder assignment, that he was the only one for the job, and as he watches the car explode in a ball of fire and debris he thinks maybe they underestimated his skill. Unaffected by the continued bursts of flame, he moves forward, taking aim in the direction of the sound of returning gunfire. It takes one moment for the girl behind the pistol to raise her head, two moments for her to register the figure just barely discernable behind the waves of heat and orange spark. He stops once, looks twice, alight with repulsion and pain.

His face is shrouded in a dark mask, too much make-up hiding eyes she once knew better than she knew herself, but she sees underneath the guise like she’s always done, like she always was trained to do.

Her hair is stick straight instead of curly long, but still red as the blood that’s stained both of their pasts, presents and futures.

 

-

 

Her name is Natasha Romanov.

Her name _was_ Natalia Romanova.

 

-

 

His name is Bucky Barnes.

His name _was_ James Buchanan.

 

-

 

There’s a lot they don’t remember, except when it comes to each other.


End file.
